AFTERWORD 351 



does not like being posted as an enemy of poetry and faith 

 and religion. He does not like being defined as crassly ma- 

 terialist, a man exclusively of the earth earthy." {Atlantic 

 Monthly, April 24, 1924, p. 490.) Apart from their object, 

 the likes or dislikes of an evolutionist are a matter of indif- 

 ference. What we want to know is whether his dislike is 

 merely for the names, or whether it extends to the reality 

 denoted by these names. Human nature has a weakness for 

 euphemisms. Men may "want the game without the name," 

 particularly when, deservedly or undeservedly, the name hap- 

 pens to have an offensive connotation. 



There are, no doubt, evolutionists who mingle enough dual- 

 ism with their philosophy to mitigate the most objectionable 

 aspects of its basic monism. In so doing, however, they are 

 governed by considerations that are wholly extraneous to evo- 

 lutionary thought. Indeed, if we take Kellogg's words at 

 their face value (that is, in a sense which he would probably 

 disclaim), it is in spite of his philosophy that the evolutionist 

 is a spiritualist. "And just as religion and cheating," reasons 

 Kellogg, "can apparently be compassed in one man, so can 

 one man be both evolutionist and idealist." {Loc. cit., p. 490.) 

 If this comparison holds true, the evolutionist can be an 

 idealist only to the extent that he is inconsistent or hypo- 

 critical, since under no other supposition could piety and crime 

 coexist in one and the same person. 



Be that as it may, the majority of evolutionists are avowed 

 mechanists and materialists, in all that concerns the explana- 

 tion of natural phenomena. "That there may be God who 

 has put his Spirit into men" (Kellogg, ibid., p. 491), they are 

 condescendingly willing to concede. And small credit to them 

 for this; for who can dis-prcwe the existence of God, or the spir- 

 ituality of the human soul? Nevertheless, it is impossible, they 

 maintain, to be certain on these subjects. Natural science is 

 in their eyes the only form of human knowledge that has any 

 objective validity. Proofs of human spirituality they de- 

 nounce as metaphysical, and metaphysics is for them synony- 



